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3:03 Speaker 01 I am joined today by David Sloan and Mariel Pearson. I know who you are. And you guys are huge advocates of betrayal. But can you tell the audience who you are in relationship to the show? David, why don't you go first?
3:19 Speaker 03 Sure, I'm the creative lead for ABC News Longform, which comprises ABC News Studios, 2020 Nightline and Impact, our other news magazines. So I'm the creative lead over content.
3:33 Speaker 04 And I'm Mariel Pearson. I'm the executive producer over here overseeing your wonderful show, Andrea. And yeah, I work really closely with David on a lot of the things that he's working on. But I work really closely with your producer, John Hirsch, on making beautiful television out of your amazing podcast.
3:53 Speaker 01 How did you guys get into true crime?
3:56 Speaker 04 David is the king of true crime. You, I'm passing that to you.
4:00 Speaker 03 I mean, I have been doing crime since I worked on 2020, 25 years ago, or maybe a little longer. And I became the executive producer for 20 years. And it's ferreting out these stories of not only the most notorious. And it's like the seven deadly sins. I mean, why crimes are committed? It's jealousy, it's envy, it's anger. These are universal kinds of feelings in humanity. But the eighth deadly sin is betrayal. It's almost the eighth deadly sin. It's not in there along with gluttony and sloth and all of those other ones. But it really is one of the deadly sins.
4:39 Speaker 03 And again, it has a commonality where someone everywhere on earth has been betrayed by someone, big or small.
4:47 Speaker 01 I'm so curious. What made you guys interested in taking the weekly series and converting it to TV? Obviously, we've done Stacy's story, Jen's story and Ashley's story.
4:59 Speaker 04 Yes.
5:00 Speaker 01 What made you interested in the weekly format?
5:03 Speaker 03 It's been remarkable. These limited series on Hulu have been remarkably received and keep adding viewers all the time in terms of driving subscriptions on Hulu. And then we just thought like, why are we doing this for the network?
5:19 Speaker 04 But you know what Dre is? What is really remarkable about this is we all ask about how transferable these kinds of stories and the popularity is between platforms. And I think what we've learned from your show and a couple others is with a very, very powerful podcast, that translates into network, that translates into viewers on Hulu. And it is astonishing to me because there are very few things that migrate cross-platform with the success of betrayal. And we've seen it happen time and again, certainly with the Hulu series and with the network series as well. Your listeners, your audience are tuned in to watch these stories as they evolve on television series.
6:02 Speaker 01 They're a very loyal community. And so it's really cool to see them support every phase of betrayal, whether it be when we went from limited to the weekly and then when we launched the show on Hulu. So it's really cool to see the feedback from the listeners and then advocate for the show and for the storytellers. What are some of the stories that you're looking forward to the most this season? I mean, obviously, I have my darklings, but I'm curious which ones are yours?
6:31 Speaker 03 I'm looking forward to the abduction. I mean, where do you get the story of? First of all, the best stories have the perpetrator, or the husband, as I will call him. He's really a perpetrator. The best villains are the ones hiding in plain sight. So this guy is a devoted father. He's a financial advisor who his clients trust. He's an elder at their church. And to think that he also would get involved in abduction and ransom and a soundproof dungeon with victims? It almost shocks the conscience. And it is really the ones who are hiding in plain sight that are truly remarkable and the most frightening.
7:16 Speaker 01 What about you, Marielle?
7:17 Speaker 04 I am looking forwards to Morgan because Morgan is so spunky. Morgan is successful. Morgan is not going to let anybody take her down. Morgan fights back, as many of these women do.
7:29 Speaker 01 Yeah.
7:30 Speaker 04 You don't have to be victimized. You don't have to take it from somebody. You can do something about it. And it is fascinating to me how a woman like Morgan kind of shows you a little bit of the heart of darkness. Because one little theme that I've seen emerge from this series is a lot of men who really didn't feel comfortable with their wives' success. That they really, who knows at what point they decided they wanted to take that down? But it was a power thing. It wasn't just a betrayal thing, which is already awful enough. But it really raised questions in my mind about what the ultimate, deeper, darker motivation of some of these men was. Were they trying to take that woman down?
8:13 Speaker 01 It's such a great point. When you watch Crystal Harris's episode, you will find similarities between Sean Harris, which is Crystal's husband. And Rodney, Morgan's ex-husband. Mm-hmm. Different scenarios. Crystal was the breadwinner, she was working, he was taking care of the kids, and then he experiences loss and he starts to change. The same story is very similar in Morgan's case. It's really, to see things, just, you know, to see those like themes come up in these perpetrators and the offenders is so fascinating.
8:50 Speaker 03 Yes.
8:51 Speaker 01 The one thing I was gonna say off your point, David, about these perpetrators hiding in plain sight is some of these stories are hiding in plain sight. I remember when Danielle emailed us, I think her email was like three sentences long, and it was just like, "Big fan of the podcast", you know, really quick in and out. You would have no idea what that woman went through. She just heard the show, she wrote in, and you would never know that her husband at one point had a dungeon in a random rental property. You know, it's a real indication of you just don't know what someone has gone through or what they're going through.
9:30 Speaker 03 I'm so full of admiration to the Glass Group, because what you have done with the podcast, and we've been lucky enough to meet you and to collaborate with you on the, on the network and on Hulu, is that you've created a sisterhood.
9:45 Speaker 01 Yeah.
9:46 Speaker 03 You've created a sisterhood not of just listeners, but women who can, can bear witness to stories like the other listeners, and it's, it's very, very impressive and rare, and the fact that it keeps regenerating and really snowballing into almost this sort of movement of women sharing these stories and taking power and empowering themselves. It's just this collective strength that I, I really admire all of you for bringing this about.
10:22 Speaker 01 Oh, thank you for saying that. That means a lot to me.
10:24 Speaker 04 What I kind of love about this series is true crime in the past has taken a little bit of criticism because it's been too much about the crime, the salacious of the crime or the perpetrator. This brings it firmly into the space of the victims, of the people to whom the crime is being perpetrated on.
10:45 Speaker 01 Yeah.
10:45 Speaker 04 But I've got to say that there's something incredibly emotionally compelling about constantly reframing the crime within that context between a woman's, inside of a woman's point of view. Although I shouldn't just say a woman, because I mean, we should tease it a little bit, Andrea, that we have a man.
11:05 Speaker 01 We do.
11:06 Speaker 04 We have a man betrayal in the heart coming up.
11:08 Speaker 01 We do. Ramon, and he was the first man that we had on The Weekly, and that was a watershed moment. Obviously, aside from Tyler on the Hulu doc, it was, I think Tyler really set a stage for men to participate in betrayal. Because I do think that there's a lot, there is a level of shame in every storyteller where they feel they are the only one that got duped, they're the only one that didn't see it. And I think for male storytellers, it's really hard in particular. And Ramon, man, is he not just so strong and willing and just to stand on his two feet and say, this is what happened to me.
11:49 Speaker 01 I am so grateful to the both of you for believing in betrayal and just being a fan of the show and the stories. And so I can't thank you enough. Muriel, do you want to tell the audience where they can find Betrayal, Secrets and Lies?
12:04 Speaker 04 Betrayal, Secrets and Lies, coming to the ABC News Network near you, Sundays, 10 o'clock Eastern Standard Time, streaming on Hulu and Disney Plus afterwards. Watch us and be part of that wonderful sisterhood that David was talking about.
12:20 Speaker 01 Thank you, guys. I really appreciate you taking the time.
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Previous Update from Season 3 | BONUS | Stacey and Tyler’s Story Next A Conversation with RAINN | BONUS | Saskia’s Story Page updated October 30, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated